Osprey Down: Marines Shift Story on Controversial Warplane’s Safety Record

It’s an aircraft with a reputation for falling from the sky. But on at least one occasion, the U.S. military’s controversial V-22 Osprey tiltrotor — a hybrid transport that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like an airplane, thanks to its rotating engine nacelles — did just the opposite. It flew upward, out of control of its pilots.

On March 27, 2006, at a Marine Corps air base in New River, North Carolina, an MV-22 assigned to Medium Tiltrotor Training Squadron 204 experienced an unplanned surge in engine power as the three-man crew was preparing for a flight. “That caused the aircraft to inadvertently lift off the deck approximately 30 feet,” Marine spokesman Maj. Shawn Haney explained. “It came back down … there was major damage sustained to the right wing and the right engine.”

Luckily, the three crewmembers were unhurt. The cost to repair the self-flying Osprey totaled $7,068,028, according to the Naval Safety Center, which tracks all Navy and Marine aircraft mishaps. An investigation by the Navy and manufacturers Bell and Boeing resulted in tweaks to the V-22’s engine controls.

Yet the Marines and the Naval Safety Center ultimately decided that the Osprey’s dangerous joyride didn’t count as a serious flying accident, known in Pentagon parlance as a “Class A flight mishap.” The reason, said Capt. Brian Block, a Marine spokesman: The aircraft wasn’t supposed to take off just then; therefore, it’s not a flight problem. If a V-22 suffers damage while preparing to launch or after landing, or if the crew does not explicitly command the aircraft to take off but it does anyways, then the accident doesn’t count as a flight accident.

“No intent for flight existed,” he told Danger Room. “As such, it is not included in calculating the Class A flight mishap rate.”

It’s not the only seemingly serious accident that the Marines neglected to include in its tally of flight mishaps for the Osprey. A review of press reports, analysts’ studies and military records turns up 10 or more potentially serious mishaps in the last decade of V-22 testing and operations. At least three — and quite possibly more — could be considered Class A flight mishaps, if not for pending investigations, the “intent for flight” loophole and possible under-reporting of repair costs.

The Marines boast that the Osprey is the “safest tactical rotorcraft within the U.S. Marine Corps” over the last decade, in the words of Lt. Col. Jason Holden, the V-22 plans officer at Marine Corps headquarters in Virginia. By the official reckoning of the Marine Corps and the Naval Safety Center, the V-22 has a Class A flight mishap rate of 1.28 per 100,000 flight hours over the last 10 years, compared to a Class A flight mishap rate of 2.6 per 100,000 flight hours for all Marine aircraft over the same period.

But the Marines have given all sorts of reasons not to trust that official rate.

Past Is Prologue

In conversations with Danger Room about the Osprey’s mishap rate, Block and Holden changed their story several times.

Until 2009, a Class A mishap involved damages up to $1 million. Then, the standard changed to $2 million. In an initial interview, Holden said the Marines had “reclassified mishaps,” applying the new and higher threshold to older incidents. In other words, the Corps artificially shrunk the apparent, relative severity of past accidents — a practice forbidden by the Naval Safety Center.

Worse, it’s the Marines themselves who are responsible for tallying the cost of Osprey accidents, except in cases where someone dies. For non-fatal mishaps, the Naval Safety Center only keeps the records. In that way, most V-22 accidents are only as severe as the Marines say they are. And even in cases where someone dies, as happened this summer, the Marines can benefit from the slow progress of the Naval Safety Center’s investigations.

Finally, the Marines carefully avoid lumping the Air Force’s Osprey — called the “CV-22″ — into their assessment of the tiltrotor’s safety, even though the aircraft are largely identical, were developed by the same program office and are counted together whenever the military and industry want to boast about the total number of hours the Osprey has flown. Including the CV-22 could nearly triple the Osprey’s Class A flight mishap rate, to a level greater than the average for the Pentagon’s air fleet.

The bottom line: the Osprey appears to be far less safe than the Marines would have us believe. Approximately one out of every 15 V-22s built in the last decade has been destroyed or badly burned in an accident, though many have been repaired.

This happened before — and it wasn’t supposed to happen again. Between 1991 and 2000, four V-22s were destroyed during test flights. Thirty people died as a result, turning the Osprey from the Pentagon’s most revolutionary warplane into the most controversial aircraft in the Defense Department arsenal. The Marines copped to covering up problems with the original Osprey, and lobbied hard for the time and money to fix their troubled tiltrotor.

Design changes by Bell and Boeing between 2001 and 2005 supposedly produced an “Osprey Version 2.0″ with none of the earlier flaws. “The V-22 flying today in Iraq and Afghanistan and flying out to the Marine Expeditionary Units is not the same V-22 we had years ago,” Holden said. “We had problems, acknowledged the problems and have gone to fix them.”

Today, an assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas churns out four V-22s a month for the Marines and Air Force — and manufacturers Bell and Boeing are pressing the Pentagon and Congress to add another 122 copies to the existing order for nearly 200. The companies are also pushing the Osprey as an export item for America’s allies, including Canada and Israel.

But the narrative of the new-and-improved Osprey Mark Two — a narrative enthusiastically advanced by many government officials, industry executives and sympathetic reporters — disguises disturbing evidence of continuing problems with the V-22, especially its engines.

What follows is the history of the V-22 that the Pentagon and its boosters don’t want you to read — a history of botched design, reckless testing, possible cover-ups and media spin. But mostly, it’s the history of an aircraft capable of some amazing feats, but whose capabilities still come at the cost of burned aircraft and dead men.

From the Lab to the Front Lines

The idea of a hybrid chopper-airplane isn’t new. In fact, it’s been around since the 1920s. But it took the determination — some might say “obsession” — of one man to drag tiltrotors out of the laboratory and into the real world. While working on old-school AH-1 and UH-1 helicopters for Texas-based Bell in the early 1970s, engineer Dick Spivey became enamored of the company’s experimental XV-3, a small, experimental tiltrotor. In ’73, NASA gave Bell $26 million to develop a successor to the XV-3 called the XV-15 (pictured). Spivey became its chief proponent — or “peddler,” as Spivey describes himself.

It took eight years of lobbying, but in 1981 Spivey won over Navy Secretary John Lehman. And when the Marines decided to replace hundreds of Vietnam War-era CH-46 helicopters with a new aircraft, Lehman ordered them to make it a tiltrotor. “I want to bring the Marine Corps into the 21st century on the leading edge of technology,” Lehman said, according to journalist Richard Whittle’s book The Dream Machine. From that moment on, the Marines were wedded to the tiltrotor concept. And when the larger V-22 replaced the XV-15 at Bell, the Marines’ fixation transferred to it, specifically.

At one time or another, all the other military branches expressed interest in the V-22, but only the Marines and Air Force stuck with it — and it was the Marines, with their greater need and enthusiasm, that drove the Osprey’s design. Problem was, the Marines had some, ahem, unique demands.

For one, all their aircraft have to fit in large numbers on the flight decks of amphibious assault ships. For helicopters, stowage is easy: You just fold back the rotors. That way, a CH-46 Sea Knight, the chopper the V-22 is meant to replace, can fit into a space just 50 feet by 10 feet. But a tiltrotor is more complex than a helicopter — and it has wings. Even so, “the V-22 is designed to operate at the same level and class of flight operations as the H-46,” according to a handbook (.pdf) published by Navair, the Navy’s main aviation office.

That forced Bell and Boeing to shrink down the V-22 into the smallest possible size, while also adding a system to fold and stow the wing and the rotors. Those two requirements imposed big constraints on the rest of the V-22’s design. The aircraft’s hydraulic lines not only had to fit into a tiny space — they also had to twist and rotate with the nacelles and wing. In The Dream Machine, Whittle describes an engineer experimenting with cords twisted around a cardboard tube as he struggled to devise a working layout for the Osprey’s hydraulics.

It gets worse. The Osprey’s rotors are five feet shorter than Bell engineers believed they should be, Whittle told Danger Room. That meant that each of the Osprey’s two Rolls-Royce AE 1107 engines had to produce more thrust than is normal for a rotorcraft powerplant: 6,200 horsepower, compared to just 4,400 for each of three engines on the CH-53 heavylift chopper.

Producing that much thrust means the tiltrotor’s motors run hot. So hot, in fact, that V-22 pilots have to “jiggle” the engines to avoid melting ships’ decks before takeoff. The downwash from the engines is so powerful that “a person cannot see or breathe in that area,” according to one member of the V-22 test team in the 2005 timeframe. When V-22s dropped in on New York City’s Fleet Week celebration in May 2010, the rotor blast from one arriving tiltrotor sent tree branches flying. Seven spectators went to the hospital with minor injuries.

The end result of the Osprey’s compromised design process: overly complex aircraft whose engines run dangerously close to normal margins. Leaving aside the aerodynamic dangers associated with tiltrotors, the V-22 was a deeply flawed aircraft at the commencement of its flight test program in 1989. Even so, the aircraft had plenty of defenders in the military and Congress. Then there were the crashes … and even the staunchest defenders had to admit that the Osprey, as initially designed, was a deathtrap.

Widowmaker

The V-22’s early history was written in blood.

In June 1991, there was a non-fatal tumble to the ground while hovering, depicted above — an incident chalked up to a misrouted flight-control wire. Then in July 1992, a hydraulic leak sent a V-22 plunging into the Potomac River, killing seven crew. A crash in April 2000 resulted from “vortex ring state,” a sort of aerodynamic whirlpool that can drag down any rotorcraft, but especially a tiltrotor; 19 crew and passengers died.

Despite this, the V-22 was months later declared “operationally effective and operationally suitable,” as Boeing crowed in an October 2000 press release. Two months after that, another hydraulic leak sparked a fire that destroyed a V-22 and killed four people.

After the fourth crash, the V-22 was grounded and its test scores negated. Thanks to intensive lobbying, the Marines still had Congress’ support for their deadly tiltrotor — but barely. “I think another crash would shut us down,” Air Force Col. Craig Olson, the new V-22 program manager, told Wired reporter Ron Berler. Olson and Ken Baile, the program’s new chief engineer, faced an unenviable task: saving the V-22 from itself. They set about revamping the Osprey design and the risk-addicted culture of tiltrotor pilots, maintainers and developers.

According to the official story, they succeeded on both counts. “Between 2001 and 2005, the Osprey was redesigned and retested,” Whittle wrote in a recent piece for AOL Defense. “Sloppily laid out hydraulic lines were rerouted, putting a stop to frequent and dangerous leaks. Flaws in flight control software, which in combination with a hydraulic leak had caused one fatal crash, were fixed. A trio of brave test pilots deliberately and repeatedly flew the Osprey into [vortex ring state] and figured out how a pilot could get out of it.”

In the fall of 2005, the V-22 passed its operational test … again. The Osprey Mark Two was cleared for combat. Ospreys flew into action in Iraq in 2007, and Afghanistan two years later. At the time, one insider predicted hard times for the Osprey in its initial deployments. Ward Carroll, spokesman for the V-22 program from 2002 to 2005 and a self-described “fan of the V-22,” wrote in 2007 that he expected six Ospreys to suffer six Class A mishaps during the first three years of operations. (At the time, a Class A mishap was any incident causing loss of life or at least $1 million in damage.)

But over the course of 11 deployments, during which Ospreys flew tens of thousands of hours in combat conditions, just one V-22 was destroyed with loss of life: Air Force CV-22 number 06-0031 crashed under mysterious circumstances in the early morning of April 9, 2010, in Zabul province, southern Afghanistan. Investigators still haven’t determined exactly what happened.

According to the Osprey’s boosters, between 2001 and early 2011 — in other words, since the introduction of the Osprey Mark Two — that was one of only two Class A flight mishaps. The other one, the only Marine Class A, occurred during a training flight in North Carolina in 2007. It cost $16,162,436 to repair. “The MV-22 has had the lowest Class A mishap rate of any rotorcraft in the Marine Corps during the past decade,” Boeing claimed.

That brings the Osprey’s serious accident rate to roughly two per 100,000 flight hours. It’s lower than the average crash rate for Marine aircraft over the last decade, which currently stands at around 2.6 per 100,000 flight hours. Take out the Air Force accident, as those in the Marines’ camp tend to do, and the rate falls farther still. “Given that record, anyone who calls the Osprey ‘unsafe’ or ‘accident-prone’ these days either hasn’t bothered to learn the facts or is willfully ignoring them,” Whittle wrote.

The New and Improved V-22?

The Marines and their backers may promise a nearly unblemished safety record for the Osprey. But the list they keep to back up those claims is uneven, at best. A survey of news reports and government documents shows the “facts” of the V-22 safety record aren’t what they seem — and that the military’s own claims have to be taken with, at minimum, a grain of salt.

“The incentives for the Marine Corps to downgrade the severity of Osprey mishap data are obvious,” former Naval Postgraduate School professor Craig Hooper wrote in 2009. “The program had (and still has) a lot to lose if the rate of MV-22 Class A mishaps increases. Why? Because the Marine Corps regularly uses the low rate of reported MV-22 Class A mishaps to sell the program to policymakers.”

In March 2003, a V-22 was flying a test sortie when “severe” vibration set in, according to a report (.pdf) from Lee Gaillard, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Defense Information. When the engine nacelles were opened up, mechanics discovered a dozen cracked bond straps, a snapped internal support bracket, and a sheared-off bolt head.

Two years later to the month, a V-22 “erupted in flames when a leaking hydraulic line dripped fluid onto hot engine parts,” Gaillard recalled. “I’d have a real hard time believing it was anything less than $1 million [in damage], but that’s total speculation on my part,” one former Marine Osprey mechanic told Danger Room on condition of anonymity.

An Air Force V-22 experienced problems with its de-icing equipment in October 2005. “Accumulated ice broke loose and damaged the tail and other parts of the aircraft, including the engines — which had to be replaced after its unscheduled landing.”

None of these incidents are included in the Marines’ current assessment of the V-22’s safety record. Nor is the March 2006 accidental takeoff that resulted in a hard landing and $7 million in damage. Also not counted: engine fires in December 2006 and March 2007. Another engine fire in November 2007 caused $16,162,436 in damage. That incident does count.

But an engine failure in Iraq in June 2008 doesn’t. “An inspection showed possible damage to the engine compressor blades from foreign objects,” Bob Cox from the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram reported. “But there was also an indication that the engine combustion liner was breaking up and pieces had further damaged other engine parts.”

In March 2009, another Air Force Osprey suffered problems with its de-icing gear and lost an engine during takeoff. “The aircraft involved in the mishap landed safely but the engine was ruined by ingesting pieces of the broken parts.”

In April this year, an Osprey’s landing gear collapsed while the aircraft was on the ground, inflicting $1,229,408 in damage. In June, an Osprey “experienced a hard landing shortly after takeoff,” incurring $1.5 million in damage, the Naval Safety Center reported.

Most tragically, in July a Marine crew chief was killed when he fell from a V-22 as the tiltrotor was departing a landing zone in Afghanistan. Marine Osprey plans officer Holden said he didn’t know yet whether the fatal fall had anything to do with the Osprey’s design or equipment. Until the Naval Safety Center can say for sure, the crew chief’s death, like so many other Osprey incidents, stays off the books.

Vanishing Mishaps

The Marines have a simple explanation for why all but one of the above incidents don’t factor in their assessment of the V-22’s safety record: They only record their most serious accidents. Air Force Ospreys simply don’t count, in the Marines’ reckoning. Nor does any accident short of the most severe category. “What we track and publish are Class A mishaps,” Holden told Danger Room.

What’s more, those Class A mishaps have to occur in flight or with “intent for flight,” as Block noted. The Marines only count accidents that occur when the Osprey is flying or just about to take off. A major fire on board a taxiing aircraft doesn’t qualify. Nor does an accidental takeoff and subsequent crash, as occurred in March 2006.

And that’s not all. For most of the V-22’s history, the threshold for a Class A incident was $1 million in damage or a fatality. Then, in October 2009, the Pentagon brass revised the threshold upwards to $2 million or a fatality, owing to inflation. “Life is getting expensive,” Holden explained.

When I asked Holden and Block about the application of mishap standards, their story shifted several times over the course of a few weeks.

After the military raised the Class A threshold in October 2009, the Naval Safety Center “changed the reporting requirements and reclassified mishaps to accurately report them under this guideline,” Holden said on September 21. In other words, some Marine V-22 incidents that might have been officially serious mishaps prior to 2009 magically became less serious. Any incidents costing more than $1 million but less than $2 million disappeared, all with the stroke of a pen.

That runs directly counter to military procedure. All the armed services classify aviation accidents according to the Class A threshold at the time of the incident. Asked if there is supposed to be any retroactive adjusting of definitions to judge past incidents by current, inflated standards, Naval Safety Center spokesperson April Phillips’ answer was clear: “No.”

But that’s exactly what Holden said the Marines were doing with the V-22.

Pressed for clarification, Block insisted that a Pentagon memo authorized the Marines to retroactively reclassify V-22 accidents going back to 2002. But the memo, dated Oct. 5, 2009 and signed by then Undersecretary of Defense Ashton Carter, authorizes no such thing.

It does, however, mention the Pentagon’s ongoing efforts “to reduce FY [fiscal year] 2002 baseline mishap rates by 75 percent by the end of FY 2012.” Ashton’s safety initiative would require the recalculation of internal statistical goals, but did not retroactively alter the Class A threshold.

When I pointed this out, Block conferred with Holden then insisted they were simply wrong that any reclassification had occurred. “Lt. Col. Holden was mistaken,” Block said on September 29. “Now I’m correcting that.” But Block insisted his and Holden’s misunderstanding did not change the V-22’s safety record or its status as the Marine Corps’ “safest tactical rotorcraft.”

“Our numbers come from the Naval Safety Center,” Block added.

The problem there is, some of the numbers don’t come from the Naval Safety Center. In cases where no one dies, it’s the Marines themselves who report the nature and cost of a mishap to the Naval Safety Center, Phillips said.

In other words, a non-fatal mishap is only as severe as the Marines say it is — and might not count at all if there was no “intent for flight.” Inconsistent public statements, the “intent” loophole and a track record of falsifying records at the squadron level both cast into doubt the military’s reliability when it comes to reporting the true cost of an accident.

Take, for example, an engine fire in December 2006. A Marine investigative team initially told the Naval Safety Center that the fire would cost more than $1 million to repair. “The assessment can be changed as necessary, until the investigation is complete,” Staff Sgt. Angela Mink said. And that’s exactly what happened. The final bill the Marines presented to the Naval Safety Center was for $906,303 — just 10 percent shy of a Class A.

The pilot of that V-22? Holden himself.

Naval Safety Center statistics include several V-22 mishaps that conveniently came in just below the Class A threshold. Besides Holden’s fire, there was an engine-related fire in May 2009 that cost $766,718 to repair and a crash landing in June that the Marines have tentatively priced at $1.5 million.

The former Marine V-22 mechanic questioned the Marine Corps’ data. He asked how an engine fire, in particular, can be anything but serious — and expensive, considering each of the Osprey’s engines costs more than $2 million and is encased in an exotic carbon-fiber nacelle. Engine fires “are not minor,” the mechanic told Danger Room. “Also the costs to repair them are ridiculously high.”

Higher, perhaps, than the Marines will admit. “Damage caused by fires is usually composites damage that I guess … can be repaired,” Holden said.

But “even a small amount” of composites damage “would be very expensive,” the mechanic countered, without providing a specific dollar figure.

Early in the V-22’s history, there was a famous case of false reporting. In January 2001, Lt. Col. O. Fred Leberman, commander of what was then the Marines’ only Osprey squadron, was fired after investigators discovered he had been ordering his mechanics to falsify maintenance records. “The reason we need to lie or manipulate the data or however you want to call it, is that this program is in jeopardy,” Leberman said while being secretly recorded.

The false reporting continued well into the era of the Osprey Mark Two, according to the former mechanic, who worked on the “new” Ospreys from 2003 to 2006. He scoffed when asked if he had felt pressure from his commanders to downplay the V-22’s mechanical problems. “Pressure? I personally drafted the daily reliability reports which were then manipulated to reflect better-than-actual reporting. I was not pressured to do anything but was a direct witness to false reporting.”

Doubling Down

Five years after a Marine V-22 went for an unintended joyride, and 18 months after an Air Force Osprey plowed into the ground in southern Afghanistan, killing four people, the Marines and Air Force are preparing to double down on an aircraft that crashes, burns or kills its occupants at a rate several times higher than the military’s official pronouncements suggest.

This spring, the Navy and Bell-Boeing began negotiations on a contract to add another 122 V-22s to the Air Force and Marine fleets. The five-year deal would cost around $10 billion and allow the Pentagon to reach its goal of buying 410 Ospreys. Congress would have to pay for it, of course. The Marines’ claims regarding the tiltrotor’s safety record are a key part of the service’s lobbying for Congressional funding.

Amid the push for more V-22s, some critics are still questioning the V-22’s worth. In February, the New York Times proposed that the Osprey “be scaled down.” D.C. watchdog group Project on Government Oversight urged Congress to consider “not renewing the procurement contract for the V-22 Osprey.” Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) called the Osprey a “boondoggle” and proposed legislation to ban the Navy from spending more money on the tiltrotor.

Journalist Whittle dismissed the opposition. “The only valid reason to oppose the Osprey these days might be cost, but many of the V-22’s critics have trouble keeping up with the facts on this point, too.” He noted the projected 10 percent decline in the tiltrotor’s per-plane cost over its final five years of production.

In a sense, Whittle is right about the Osprey’s financial cost. At $65 million per aircraft and declining, the V-22 is getting cheaper to buy. And of the $40 billion the Pentagon wants to spend on Ospreys, $30 billion has already been spent. The military can’t save much money by canceling further V-22 production.

But it could save lives. The revamped V-22 is just as accident-prone as its more visibly troubled earlier version. It’s true that the Osprey V2.0 has only killed five people, versus the 30 that died in V1.0. But that’s mostly due to luck. The former Osprey mechanic said that, of the many malfunctions, fires and failures that have plagued the V-22, and especially its engines, “each time could have very easily become … crashes.”